Parallel Threads in Racket v9.0
20 hours ago
- #Racket
- #Programming
- #Parallel Computing
- Racket v9.0 introduces support for shared-memory threads, enabling parallel execution on multicore hardware.
- Parallel threads can be created by adding the `#:pool 'own` flag to the `thread` function call.
- The `#:keep 'result` argument allows retaining the result of a thread's computation, retrievable via `thread-wait`.
- Coroutine threads remain the default for lightweight, preemptive scheduling, suitable for tasks like GUI interactions.
- Racket's transition to Chez Scheme (CS) provided a better foundation for parallelism, including parallel garbage collection.
- Performance benchmarks show significant speedups for parallelizable tasks, though I/O operations remain a bottleneck.
- Backward compatibility is maintained, with existing synchronization constructs working seamlessly with parallel threads.
- Atomic mode and foreign function calls have been adapted to work safely with parallel threads, though with some performance considerations.